Sabotaging Bitcoin

Post by Turneyboy » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 9:04 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #95

w10-1 wrote: post #62

TIL the scale of bitcoin derivatives in 2020 (hence volatility): ~2T on 2B market activity. Jeepers! --- Starting in late 2020, as shown in The Economist's graphic, the spot market in Bitcoin became dwarfed by the derivatives markets. In the last month $1.7T of Bitcoin futures traded on unregulated exchanges, and $6.4B on regulated exchanges. Compare this with the $1.8B of the spot market in the same month. ---

Why would you expect the scale of the derivatives to be related to the scale of the spot market, especially if the derivatives are cash-settled futures? One is basically gambling on the price of BTC going up or down, and the other is trading the actual BTC, right?

Post by officialchicken » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 9:06 AM UTC

mrb wrote: post #101

sebbyBinx wrote: post #93

Part of this post addresses the economics of creating a 6 block re-org. This makes sense as 6-confimations is the standard for Bitcoin finality today . However, as Bitcoin's security inevitably weakens over the coming years due to diminishing miner rewards (denominated in BTC), I believe this "6-confimation" acceptance policy will change to include not only the number of confirmations, but the timing of those confirm…

"Bitcoin's security inevitably weakens over the coming years due to diminishing miner rewards (denominated in BTC)" That's incorrect. Security scales with USD-denominated rewards, not BTC-denominated. And there are 16 years of real-world data showing they have been generally increasing, so a healthy sign that the Bitcoin experiment is working: https://newhedge.io/bitcoin/block-reward-per-block And not only that, but…

Post by officialchicken » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 9:08 AM UTC

mrb wrote: post #105

free_bip wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you so confident that it will never weaken? Especially since there will come a time when the block reward is literally 0.

Tx fees make up a bigger and bigger fraction of miner rewards over time.

Post by copirate » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 9:36 AM UTC

emil-lp wrote: post #110

copirate wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a pool can set up a situation where they mine a block and wait X seconds to reveal it, they can force other miners to waste X seconds of has power and gain an advantage. How is it wasted if they work on the current chain? If they find a block during those X seconds, they'll propagate it before the waiting pool does. The waiting pool will then just lose the revenue from the block they put on hold. They're the one…

If you mine a block without revealing it, not only are you the only one that can mine the next block after that, but everyone is mining on the "wrong head". There's of course the risk that someone finds a different head in the meantime, but otherwise, you waste competitors' resources, while you get an advantage on the next block.

Post by copirate » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 9:39 AM UTC

RealityVoid wrote: post #107

copirate wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a pool can set up a situation where they mine a block and wait X seconds to reveal it, they can force other miners to waste X seconds of has power and gain an advantage. How is it wasted if they work on the current chain? If they find a block during those X seconds, they'll propagate it before the waiting pool does. The waiting pool will then just lose the revenue from the block they put on hold. They're the one…

Right, but the odds of this happening is small(ish) - I'm certain there is a sweet spot for witholding time. If they don't find a block within the time interval, then effectively all the work for that time is "wasted" by the other participants since it could not have been put on the chain anyway AND the witholder has a headstart of a couple of seconds searching for a new block.